Ever wondered how many different states of Rubik’s Cube are possible? Well you need a computer to record that. And you know what, you can get money for that.

A computer institute has been awarded $200,000 in order to solve the legendary eighties puzzle, the Rubik’s Cube. Director of the Institute for Complex Scientific Software at Northeastern University in Boston, Gene Cooperman, is studying Rubik’s Cubes as a way of setting up machines to study combinatorial problems in science and operations research.

He wants to record as many different states of the Rubik’s Cube as possible, which he says will exceed the 20TB of capacity that the $200,000 National Science Foundation grant recently afforded him. Happy Puzzling!